One of the fundamental operations of graphics processing units (GPUs) is texturing. A texture map is a source array of color values (i.e. texels) that may be mapped to a surface of a graphics object. For each pixel in a digital image, one or more texels in the texture map are sampled and filtered to produce a color value for the pixel. Texturing may be used to generate more realistic computer generated images of a three-dimensional model.
Sampling the texture map typically requires texel values to be fetched from memory. The memory operations may introduce latency into the texture operation, slowing down the graphics processing pipeline. Thus, there is a need for addressing this issue and/or other issues associated with the prior art.